I have worked in this industry for long enough to know that even assuming a minimum of knowledge at all is a bad idea. You can fight this fight as you want, but this comment has nothing in it to convince be otherwise.
Because it's human nature to only care about details that you believe you need to know in order to manage some part of your life.
If you don't see a clear and immediate value in learning something, you won't. No matter what anyone else says or does to try and convince you, you won't.
Then you get burned by something you didn't know, and there's a 50/50 chance you'll learn about it then, and only if you're convinced that it's something YOU have to do, that can't be managed for you.
And most people resent having to learn that much.
I no longer try to convince anyone of anything tech related. And rarely answer much when I am asked, unless I can see that the person is truly interested, not just curious about some buzzword.
Meanwhile in 2019, most people still find "nothing to hide" attitude perfectly reasonable.
For the normal, everyday non-tech user, they see that all their friends use these apps and nothing has ever happened to them. The FBI didn't come knocking, they weren't fired from their jobs or anything like that.
From their point of view, why should they care about repositories, digital signatures etc., when they just want to use Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp and so on for some after-work (or during-work) fun / brain-swithoff. They just post some silly pictures or watch some Youtuber videos.
All these concerns about privacy just don't reach the everyday reality and real-life concerns of people and is in effect an ideological thing, similar to rejecting proprietary software on the desktop due to moral and political beliefs.
> They have to face the consequences, that's how it works
The consequences (app creators changing their practices and policies) will be spread over everyone, not on individual users. As long as their friends and society keeps using it, most people will as well. If it slowly dies out, people will use whatever is new. Most people are not that much attached to using these apps, just use them out of boredom or to interact with others. They'd easily move on if that's how things evolve.
Except the tech is already there, and you use it with or without understanding. You use a credit card, electricity, Internet and other communications, some kind of computing device, your entire life depends on it. And IT shapes your life way more than any other tech, so it probably makes sense to get a grasp on the general concepts at least. No need to become an IT expert, similarly to how there's no need to become a Shakespeare to be literate. And yes, being tech illiterate can fuck you up very visibly and personally, for example by losing money from a stolen credit card.
However only a minority of them knows how cars work under the hood. Most people understand the pedals and the steering wheel and that's it.
Same in tech. People understand there are screens, there are buttons you can click, text input fields you can type things in with the keyboard, on/off switch, sleep/standby, etc. All the things needed to operate it.
> for example by losing money from a stolen credit card.
I'm in Europe and I don't know anybody who had this happen to them, nor is identity theft a thing here. And this is mostly about phishing and social engineering anyway, not about understanding the tech background of package managers and digital signatures.
I have had the exact same experience. I've long given up trying to explain anything to normies, including anything related to privacy.
I really pains me to say this, but the bleating masses are the bleating masses, and getting them to internalize anything typically takes a generation.
That's what we do in every other domains, what's the difference here ?
Same reasoning for forcing people to have their cars serviced by mechanics and not do their own maintenance in their backyards. Otherwise we'd have people driving cars without pipes and DIY break pads. I'd much rather have that enforced by megacorps/govt than by an infinite amount of businesses/individuals trying to game the system.
For most people a smartphone is an entertainment device, a tool at best, they don't give a single fuck about the underlying tech and they should not. Feel free to root your phone and install whatever you want, you can't ask people to become tech literate, it's your hobby/job, not their. Our job is to provide them safe tools, not teach them about tech. Look at your own life, chances are you don't even have surface knowledge of 99% of the things you use daily, and that's perfectly fine, nobody expects you to be a furniture designer, building safety inspector and car mechanic.
As a service tech if I fill a car with tomato sauce instead of oil I pay for the car.
As a programmer I can sell all the users data, leak it to hacks, then laugh all the way to the bank.
As a furniture salesman I can requirements on materials transparency. If I break those I'm liable.
As a programmer I can totally change the rules of my application at any time.
If society wants to trust tech it will have to hold it's creators responsible.
The back door encryption thing is a fun example of this.
For the record, I do my own break pads. And have done the master cylinder (thing that powers the breaks) on my cars a couple of times. Not just without formal training. Without any training except what I could quickly Google.
Not sure why you would assume that prohibiting people from working on their cars would increase the level of maintenance.
> And what does having to follow the law have to do with any of this
Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law, I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon. Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime. If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously. But I guess it's fashionable these days to compare everything to nazi germany/fascism/_insert_bad_people_, no matter how convoluted the comparison is.
Can you quote where I said anything about a "regime"?
> Google is free to handle its playstore as it please as long as it follow the law,
Which is true, but completely besides the point? I am free to call you a clueless asshole. But if the discussion is about how to have a constructive dialog, me pointing out that I am free to call you a clueless asshole contributes exactly nothing to the conversation and at best shows that I have no clue what the discussion is about.
> I doubt google will pull a genocide anytime soon.
Your point being? Authoritarianism is good when it's not a genocide, because ... ?
> Setting boundaries/rules doesn't make you an authoritarian regime.
Again: Where did you pull that "regime" from? And also, no, "setting boundaries/rules" does not make for authoritarianism, that is correct. Why did you assume that I wasn't aware of that?
> If you want to pull the "this reminds me of the darkest hours of our history" card you better find something more important than an app removal from a mobile phone app store if you want to be taken seriously.
Why? And no, simply pointing out that one thing is worse than the other is not a relevant argument, that's simply straw manning, because noone claimed that one was as bad as the other.
But, you can't really provide them safe tools without fixing some of the behavioral components, can you.
"Don't try to lick the sharp parts, especially when running the machine" is an implicit and important (albeit obscure) part of the safety to operating, let's say, a band saw. Unfortunately, the intellectual bar seems to be noticeably higher for "When a very urgent and heavily accented Microsoft Support representative calls you out of the blue, don't type into your shiny techno-thingy what they tell you to".
I'm generally all for sane defaults and constructing to make spontaneous use possible too, but a lot of the time there is ultimately no other protection against dangerously wrong use of tools than not using the tools dangerously wrongly. Too bad that's a tall order for very complicated machines that can do vastly different things depending on configuration.
I know people are going to quote Heinlein here, but civilisation exists so that not everybody has to be a specialist in everything.
We need to drop the attitude that technology is a new scary thing it's not. Technology is an extension of our selves we have been using it for thousands of years to expand our ability.
Pen and paper was the old technology if you don't know how to use it you are illiterate, if you don't know how to use the new technology you are still just illiterate.
The baby boomer attitude of "I can't be arsed to improve as a person so every one else has to dumb it down for me" is unacceptable.
Do you apply that to yourself out of tech ? Are you literate in art, philosophy, astrology, history, chemistry, medicine, &c. (more than surface knowledge) ? Where do you draw the line ? Is using google maps without knowing how the GPS system works in details an issue ? What about cooking ? Do you know which chemical reactions create tastes ? Are you buying food from supermarkets, why don't you hunt and grow your own ?
> The baby boomer attitude
As if millennials+ were better. Using a pc/smartphone daily doesn't mean you're tech literate, it's a prime example of familiarity != knowledge.
And do note that there was a point in history when even basic literacy belonged to a small few who argued in exactly the same manner than tech people do today, i.e., that most people will never be able to understand basic science and maths, and we cannot hope for any better than to be benevolent dictators. Later history proved the hollowness of those claims. Today the majority in most of the developed and some of the developing countries are basically literate and what their grandparents couldn't imagine doing, they do effortlessly today. I don't see a single reason why computer sector should be any different. I'm not talking about a deep understanding of computers, just basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices.
To be fair, I'm less confident poking around behind the surface because what used to be relatively straight forward has become --for various reasons, few of which are legitimate in my eyes-- absurdly complicated.
I disagree on this. I have a friend who has "basic computer literacy" as in knows how to use MS Excel, KeePass, etc. And yet, she inadvertently got a virus on her laptop. It was puzzling how she could have gotten it. She doesn't visit the usual suspects of porn/gaming/gambling/etc websites. Just normal stuff like CNN, WSJ, etc. The only reason we found out about it was her email account got locked out by the ISP. Apparently, the malware found her MS Outlook email account and used a hidden background service to send a bunch of spam messages using her email profile. Understandably, the ISP monitors SMTP traffic sent from residential addresses and when it hits an unusual threshold, they lock out the account. To clean up the malware, I reformatted her laptop and got the email reset with a new password.
On the other hand, with her Apple iPhone and the locked-down walled garden, I really don't have to worry about malware to the same degree. Yes, the Apple app review process is not infallible and theoretically, she could get infected by downloading a fake bank app that steals all her money. However, the possibilities for that nightmare scenario are drastically reduced in the closed Apple ecosystem.
Even programmers, who we'd classify has uber-computer-literate compared to the general population can unwittingly get bit by malware:
Javascript programmers vulnerable to NPM package repository malware: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/12/npm_eslint/
Microsoft's uber geek expert Mark Russinovich got infected by Sony's rootkit: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2005/10/...
What's the solution for those programmers? Educate them on how to use computers? But they're already educated.
Yes, I get the hacker ethos of not having locked-down devices but we also overestimate the ability for the general population to maintain safe computing devices. Heck, I'm a techie that programs in Xcode and I'm not confident I'm really literate on all the vulnerabilities of the iPhone. Thus, it seems unreasonable I would expect non-programmers to "just be educated" to make the App Store's curation unnecessary.
You can do whatever you want on a platform like Windows because they make their money off of selling support for their platform, and selling their own products for it.
Google and Apple do not make money selling support for their platform, and only Apple really focuses on selling products for it. But they both make money by tightly controlling their platforms, in order to to squeeze money from developers, [in the case of Google] from manufacturers, from carriers, from users' payments, and from all the data they collect about it all. They don't have to care about the customer at all, and they can just focus on engineering. It's the programmer's dream.
Their business model is a walled garden, and they pick the fruits of that garden. In the case of Google, they run the Android platform so they have a way to still make ad money if Apple denied them access to that platform. In the case of Apple, they run the Apple platform so they can make money from expensive consumer devices, and also use it to control more of the services/products we use.
So, it really doesn't have anything to do with literacy. Even if everyone were a genius, their choice is still A) don't use a smartphone, or B) use a walled-garden smartphone.
And I'm happy with these stores and couldn't care less about your cyberpunk libertarianism.
This isn't 1984. The moment they seriously misbehave, the law will come at them, and customers will leave. Therefore they don't.
You're indulging in fantasies because you would like to believe that what interests you is all-important. That's normal: all epidemiologists belief we should talk about the flu a lot more.
But it's just a tiny slice of what matters. So don't disparage people as stupid just because they spend their energy and time with more important things than recompiling kernels.